topic Re: How to see a file's create time, access time and modification time in Operating System - Linux

How to see a files create time , access time and modification time

senthil_kumar_1 — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 16:05:14 GMT

Hi All,

How to see a files create time, access time and modification time?

What does access time and modification time mean?

Re: How to see a file's create time, access time and modification time

Dennis Handly — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 01:30:23 GMT

>How to see a file's create time, access time and modification time?

Unix and Linux don't track creation time.

You can see the latter two with "ls -lu" and "ls -l".

>What does access time and modification time mean?

Modification means what you expect, the file was modified.

Access means the file was ether read or written.

Re: How to see a file's create time, access time and modification time

H.Becker — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 16:05:44 GMT

Have a look at the fstat man page. There are three time fields st_atime, st_mtime and st_ctime: time of last access, last modification and last status change. None of these holds the creation time/date.

Further the man page explains when which field is updated. With ls you can see these times. On Linux it just looks like this:

$ rm -f aFile

$ touch aFile

$ ls -lu --full aFile # shows atime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 0 2012-02-25 16:42:05.616078588 +0100 aFile

$ ls -l --full aFile # shows mtime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 0 2012-02-25 16:42:05.616078588 +0100 aFile

$ ls -lc --full aFile # shows ctime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 0 2012-02-25 16:42:05.616078588 +0100 aFile

$ echo >>aFile hello

$ ls -lu --full aFile # shows atime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:42:05.616078588 +0100 aFile

$ ls -l --full aFile # shows mtime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:43:14.989031242 +0100 aFile

$ ls -lc --full aFile # shows ctime

-rw-r--r-- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:43:14.989031242 +0100 aFile

$ chmod o+w aFile

$ ls -lu --full aFile # shows atime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:42:05.616078588 +0100 aFile

$ ls -l --full aFile # shows mtime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:43:14.989031242 +0100 aFile

$ ls -lc --full aFile # shows ctime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:44:22.435327799 +0100 aFile

$ cat aFile

hello

$ ls -lu --full aFile # shows atime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:45:18.901684610 +0100 aFile

$ ls -l --full aFile # shows mtime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:43:14.989031242 +0100 aFile

$ ls -lc --full aFile # shows ctime

-rw-r--rw- 1 joe users 6 2012-02-25 16:44:22.435327799 +0100 aFile

As you can see, writing to the file with echo didn't change the access time.

Re: How to see a file's create time, access time and modification time

abbasmohammed — Thu, 20 Nov 2014 06:46:10 GMT

Hi All,

We can see using "stat" command.

stat filename

it will show the requested things

Re: How to see a file's create time, access time and modification time

Dennis Handly — Sun, 23 Nov 2014 01:31:32 GMT

>it will show the requested things

Except for creation time.

Re: How to see a file's create time, access time and modification time

Ajin_1 — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 09:57:15 GMT

# stat /etc/passwd
File: `/etc/passwd'
Size: 7623            Blocks: 16         IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: fd00h/64768d    Inode: 314330      Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--) Uid: (    0/    root)   Gid: (    0/    root)
Access: 2014-11-25 12:55:42.000000000 +0300
Modify: 2014-10-24 07:27:51.000000000 +0300
Change: 2014-10-24 07:27:51.000000000 +0300